“Thank the Maker!”

The history of the Star Wars franchise is strongly intertwined with the creative and industrial legacy of its creator George Lucas. Beyond establishing the Star Wars mythos, Lucas has had a transformative impact on contemporary Hollywood entertainment through the foundation and management of his production company, Lucasfilm, which includes multiple subsidiaries that have innovated filmmaking and cinema technologies, such as Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, THX, LucasArts, and Lucasfilm Animation. His significant role in the creative vision of each of these ventures demonstrates that the nature of Lucas’s authorship cannot be contained by one creative practice or role: over his career, Lucas has been director, screenwriter, story developer, producer, editor, and post-production supervisor. This multifaceted creative influence worked toward his “legendary” insistence on authorial control. ¹ As a creative and proprietary pursuit, the desire for control has often worked in tension with the transmedial expression and reception of the Star Wars franchise across its long and rich history. For this reason, my objective here is to examine the function of Lucas’s singular authorship in the context of the Star Wars franchise’s history of transmedia storytelling. I conceptualize his presence as transtextual authorship, in which the singular author is both in control of and subject to the multifarious and dynamic textual relations of transmedia storytelling.